Tuesday, 13 August 2019

Will we get No Deal because Brexiters want it more?

“The reason we might have a no-deal Brexit in Britain is because
its advocates want it more than their enemies want to stop it. They
are making it happen whilst their opponents spend their time only
wishing it would stop.”

When I first read this in an article
by Sky journalist Lewis Goodall I thought it was nonsense, and
stopped reading. It obviously does not apply, for example, to EU
citizens living in the UK or all those who march against No Deal. But
then I watched this,
a talk by Dominic Cummings on his referendum victory (HT
@ericlonners),
and I realised what Goodall was talking about.. I went back to the
article, read it in full and mostly agreed with it.

The trigger was a point that Cummings makes in his talk about most of
the media covering politics. They are essentially interested in the
government, parliament and its MPs, and so everything they say has to
be taken in this context. It is a point I have made myself before,
but it is easy to forget. Goodall is not talking about those who
march for Remain, or the trivial numbers that march for Leave, but
instead he is talking about MPs in parliament. And I think on this he
is right.

Take the discussion of a possible coalition of national unity that
MPs could vote for if the only way of stopping Johnson allowing No
Deal is to vote him out. The job of the coalition would be to get an
extension of Article 50 and then call a General Election. The idea is
that rebel Tory MPs could only do this if Corbyn does not lead that
coalition, because Corbyn “has become toxic”. So avoiding No Deal
is less important than allowing a Corbyn government, even if that
government would last no more than a month! That supports Goodall’s
thesis.

The LibDems seem
to be saying the same thing. They would not vote for a Corbyn led
coalition government even, it seems, if the alternative was No Deal.
Again avoiding No Deal is less important than allowing a very
temporary Corbyn government. That supports Goodall’s thesis too,
and it comes from the so called ‘party of Remain’.

Finally the Labour leadership has ruled out any kind of coalition of
national unity if it was not led by Corbyn. I can see why - it is
hard to admit so publicly that your leader is toxic to other Mps just
before a General Election - but nevertheless it means they are also
putting party before preventing No Deal. Goodall is right again.

But what does all this actually mean? Simply that all these MPs or
party leaders are prepared to put party interests ahead of national
interests. We can but hope that at least some of this is posturing
ahead of negotiations, but such posturing can in itself be harmful to
the cause of preventing No Deal.

Of course the corollary is not that Brexiters are putting country
ahead of party. A No Deal Brexit is only something that a fanatic
would do. A better formulation of Goodall’s idea is that No Deal
will happen because No Dealers are fanatics and opponents of No Deal
are putting party before country.

What about the nonsense that No Deal is required to respect democracy
in the form of the 2016 vote? This is preposterous
because 2016 cannot be a mandate for a No Deal Brexit when No Deal
was ruled out by the Leave campaign. Bexiters implicitly acknowledge
this is true by pretending that they had talked about No Deal in that
referendum. But if you want to see what kind of mandate 2016 does
represent, it is well worth watching the talk
by Cummings noted above.

As well as showing an acute understanding of how the UK broadcast
media works, his comments on what won the referendum for Leave are
interesting. He notes that before the referendum most people knew
little about the EU, and in addition were not particularly exercised
by it as an issue. (Polling confirms this.) So, quite simply, to win
the referendum the Leave campaign had to associate the EU in a
negative way with things people were exercised about. Cummings talks
about keeping the original Brexiters, who did want to talk about the
EU, well away from the campaign.

Cummings notes three things people did care about. The first and most
obvious was immigration. He says this issue had become 'associated
with the EU', and there were two reasons for this in my view. The
first was the Conservative targets for total net immigration which
had not been met, together with the rhetoric that blamed reduced
access to public services on immigrants rather than austerity. The
second was the idea put forward by the pro-Brexit press that these
targets had not been met because of Freedom of Movement. In this
respect the following ONS chart
is revealing:

Before the referendum non-EU immigration was equal to EU immigration,
so it is not at all obvious that Freedom of Movement was the only
reason targets were not met. Immigration has been broadly stable
since the referendum, because the fall in EU migration has been
offset by a rise in non-EU immigration.

The second factor Leave had going for it, according to Cummings, was
the outcome of the Global Financial Crisis, and I would add
austerity. The reason is obvious, but again little to do with the EU.
The third was the problems with the Eurozone, but again the
Eurozone’s problems all stemmed from a single currency, and not the
trade and other arrangements of the EU. Therefore what all three have
in common is that they have little to do with the EU.

Which brings us back to whether the people saying they want No Deal
care more about it than those who want to stop No Deal. Cummings’
analysis suggests that they don’t, because by his own admission
they were voting for issues that had little to do with the EU. They
evidently don’t because we have not seen hundreds of thousands
march on Westminster in support of any kind of Brexit. The best they
could manage
were ‘thousands’ when the March deadline was missed. We have seen
six million sign a petition to revoke Article 50, but a tenth of that
number signing a petition for No Deal.

The fact that Remainers want to stay in the EU more than No Dealers
want us to crash out should come as no surprise. Leaving the EU takes
away basic rights from EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the
EU, and confers no new rights in return It takes away the right of young people to work visa free in the
EU. It takes away many people’s European identity. Crashing out
will make almost everyone poorer and few better off. It will cost
lives. All for the notion that we will become ‘independent’, when
few Leavers can name a law imposed on them by the EU that they
disagree with, and even fewer an EU law that the UK voted against.
Brexit is one part of the population imposing considerable costs on
the rest, for reasons that have little to do with the EU.

No comments:

Post a comment

Unfortunately because of spam with embedded links (which then flag up warnings about the whole site on some browsers), I have to personally moderate all comments. As a result, your comment may not appear for some time. In addition, I cannot publish comments with links to websites because it takes too much time to check whether these sites are legitimate.